Sun&Clouds&Sea near Venice

[vesitata]

Taken last summer on a boat trip to Venice. I found that converting to sepia gave the most pleasing result..A HDR would have been interesting, but impossible in a moving boat, without tripod..
What do you think of the overexposed part? Isn't it too disturbing?

EXIF:
Camera: Canon PowerShot A520
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1600)
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 5.8 mm
Exposure Bias: 0/3 EV

[wulf]

I think it would be worth seeing if you can recover a bit of brightness from the bottom of the picture and overlaying that section. At the moment the bright part of the sky is so overpowering that the details at the bottom look rather indistinct and messy.

On one half of the attached copy, bumped up the brightness on a duplicate copy of the image using the curves tool. I then applied a graduated layer mask, like using a graduated ND filter, to keep the top as the original but (transitioning in the bank of cloud just above the sea) allow the brighter lower portion to shine through.

Wulf

[vesitata]

Thanks for the advice! I totally agree.. I'd be glad if you could give me a short tutorial on using a graduated layer mask in PS CS3. I'm quite new to the layer mask side of photoshop Thank you!

[wulf]

I use The Gimp so I can't give you PS CS3 specific instructions (although others could). How far have you got with masks? All you really need to know is that black is transparent, white is opaque and grey is in between; I created a mask and then used the gradient fill tool to create an effect that goes from fully transparent to fully opaque through a series of greys that make the lighter version increasingly more visible.

What I could do is another quick version, putting the final result and the mask used next to each other. Would that help?

Wulf

[jiminyClickit]

vesitata,

There is also some cropping you might consider, saving all the good parts of your sky, doubling the sea, bringing the clouds into a reasonable proportion:

[ELAY]

Originally Posted by vesitata

Thanks for the advice! I totally agree.. I'd be glad if you could give me a short tutorial on using a graduated layer mask in PS CS3. I'm quite new to the layer mask side of photoshop Thank you!

I use GIMP like Wulf. Here's the tutorial where I learned. Concepts are the same, only the controls would differ. The GIMP tutorial credits an earlier PS tutorial at Luminous Landscape, here.